I took the time to read the full post and it does a good job mentioning flaws in its own methodology.<p>They played 339 games total.
58 games of competitive mode.
281 games of quick play mode.<p>Roughly half (184) as a female user and (155) as a male user.<p>Most games were played in 2018 when quickplay mode did not lock players into a 2-2-2 role queue to keep teams more even.<p>They did not use voice chat.<p>"My mechanics are pretty much as bad as it's possible to get."<p>The male account had a higher competitive rank (~2000 ish? placing in the middle tier of player skill) then the female account (~1500-2000?).<p>---<p>With 2k+ hours in the game this study could go a lot further with better control groups, but is still interesting due to Overwatch's position as a very culturally diverse game that had been lauded for its ability to attract and maintain a large female playerbase in a genre that is notoriously masculine-dominated (competitive FPS games).<p>My top 3 controls I'd like to see are:<p>* Having a larger data set evenly distributed across major skill rankings (gold, plat, diamond, master, etc)<p>* Having a larger data set evenly distributed across characters (main-tank, off-tank, main-support, off-supprt, roles)<p>* Have each player engage in voice chat with a neutral tone<p>My anecdotal prediction based on my own experiences would yield:<p>* Women who talk in voice receive a flood of friend requests and sporadic sexual harassment (1/8 games?)<p>* Players of low impact heroes receive a larger set of criticisms across genders<p>* Both male and female participants inject toxicity into their own games during the study<p>* Certain ranks (silver, diamond) inject more toxicity then others<p>Finally, though these are my predictions and I do regularly play with a group of friends who are majority female, I have nowhere near a "full woman's perspective" on playing this game and my predictions could be way off across the various controls (or all controls).<p>EDIT: A soundboard with male and female voices would solve for the voice chat problem very well.